Special Exhibitions
Drawing Modern: Works from the Agnes Gund Collection
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Special Exhibitions |
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Drawing Modern: Works from the Agnes Gund Collection |
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Drawing Modern: Works from the Agnes Gund Collection
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About Agnes Gund's Collection
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About Agnes Gund's Collection Agnes Gund’s passion for art is palpable. Her belief in the ability of art to teach and inspire informs her activities as a collector and supporter of the arts and individual artists. This exhibition marks the first time that such a significant segment of her well-known private collection of works on paper has been made available to a large audience.Although recognized internationally as a philanthropist, collector, and patron of the arts, Gund is a Cleveland native who has always championed and supported this museum, and the cumulative effect of the many gifts and loans she has made to the museum has transformed the 20th-century collection. Gund has been collecting modern and contemporary art for almost 40 years. As a young woman, she made prescient purchases of large-scale paintings and sculptures by major artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Jasper Johns, and works by each of them are included in the exhibition. Drawn primarily from the postwar era, this selection reveals diverse media and styles, as well as inventive attitudes, and reflects Gund’s deep engagement with the art of our times. The works assembled here create a collective portrait of one collector's keen eye and personal aesthetic. The sensibility revealed is one that enthusiastically embraces the complexities of modern life, but appreciates tradition. Many of the works Agnes Gund has collected owe a lingering debt to formalism. The collection reveals a distinct taste for compositions that are balanced and fully resolved. Purity and clarity are key, and many works possess a serene or even classical feel. There is also a distinct absence of anything overtly confrontational or ironic in this collection. Instead, many of these drawings aspire toward spiritual or transcendent states, offering metaphoric fields for contemplation and reflection. As a group, these works on paper propose themselves as possible subjects for mystical contemplation, as meditations on contemporary life, and as vehicles for introspection. As a collector, Agnes Gund offers an inspiring model of committed and generous patronage. Page 2 of 7 | On the next page: Purchase Tickets |
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